Formal education has always served the role of preparing young people to be members of society as well as preparing them to be active contributors to the workforce of that community. A social purpose of education had a strong presence in the social welfare orientation of pre-1980s governments and a thread of this remained throughout the neoliberal influenced changes to education. That thread, which was grounded in a discourse directing the purpose of education
13 NAPLAN (National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy) commenced in 2008 and consists of four tests in the domains of Reading, Writing, Language Conventions (Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation) and Numeracy. The NAPLAN framework describes national minimum standards with regard to the skills and understandings which students, who are placed in the minimum standard band at their year level, can generally demonstrate (ACARA, 2010b).
14 For example, as recently as 2010 the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) set up the My School website which publishes data about schools. The site claims that ‘by providing extensive information on Australian schools, the My School website introduces a new level of transparency and accountability to the Australian school system.’(ACARA, 2010a).
15 Through my role working with pre-service primary school teachers, it is evident to me from the way that time is allocated in Australian schools that from the early stages of primary school there is a strong emphasis on the literacy and numeracy skills tested under NAPLAN. Progress in these areas, often interpreted through NAPLAN type testing dominates judgements about children’s early progress and the development of other skills like empathy, tolerance and cultural understanding are acquired incidentally (if at all) and are rarely specifically addressed or commented on in reports to parents.
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towards social participation and the quality of civic life, continued to find a place within education policy even during the time that economic imperatives for education were being consolidated (Wyn, 2009).
The educational paradigm represented by this thread is one that positions education as an inherently social activity for social purposes. However, social purpose is not a neutral concept. Social purposes are situated in social contexts and are influenced by prevailing ideological perspectives and power structures in society (Freire, 1970; 1972; Bourdieu, 1977). As such, it could be legitimately claimed that the economic purpose of education described in the previous section serves a ‘social purpose’
albeit one that has been narrowly interpreted to equate to a limited view of society’s best interests and prime concerns16. In this way, ‘education for social purpose’ is ideologically grounded and the term can be co-opted to serve multiple purposes including those that support existing social conditions. However, the socially-critical orientation of education presented earlier accepts none of the existing social structures as ‘given’ and requires that they be critically examined and understood in relation to more general social and moral philosophy (Kemmis et al., 1983). This section is
specifically directed towards education informed by a socially-critical perspective and which is therefore intended to engage students in a socially transformative way.
Transformative education is constructed to deliberately challenge taken-for-granted ways of viewing the world with the objective of shifting the way that people understand themselves and their connections to the world (JTED, 2011). The implicit outcome of effective transformative education is social justice and a more equitable society. Global Connections was designed to be transformative education for the young people involved. The social citizenship and social action themes of the program were intended to shift understanding of the students’ relationships with their worlds in ways that encouraged taking social action contributing towards resolving social issues. Additionally, the program could also be considered transformative with regard to its structure. The transformative elements of the program (see section 2.3.2) challenged taken-for-granted ways of viewing
educational activity with an implicit intention of shifting the way that educators understand their practice.
Global Connections challenges an education system in which schools operate to reinforce the existing interpretations of what education should include and which deliver those interpretations through traditionally structured formats. Essentially, formal education operates to reproduce rather than change societal structures and processes (Bourdieu, 1993; Holford & Nicholls, 2001; Flores, 2007).
16 See section 2.3.4 for an example of the way that the Melbourne Declaration as a formal curriculum policy document in Australia identifies social purposes of education with economic goals.
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Even when change is supported and mandated by policy change, schools are slow to accommodate innovation (Holford, 2001).
However, advocacy of socially transformative education of the kind offered by Global Connections is not new. There is a strong resonance for example, between the program’s intentions and the philosophy espoused by John Dewey nearly a century ago. Dewey (1916/2009) strongly linked education to democracy and believed that education was a social process which was best implemented interactively and experientially. Teachers under Dewey’s model of education were pedagogic guides rather than didactic dispensers of ‘truth’. Teachers were partners in the learning process, selecting experiences that would allow students to actively create their own learning. For Dewey, schools were legitimately sites of social transformation and young people were learning how to live rather than simply acquiring sets of skills and knowledge. Any skills and knowledge that were obtained should help individuals maximise their potential which could then be used for the greater good to enrich their social world (Dewey, 1916/2009; 1938/1997). Although Dewey’s advocacy of teaching grounded in experiential learning is widely endorsed in current approaches17 to student learning, his view that education should be directed toward a social transformation purpose has had less influence.
The Frankfurt School18 of critical theory took Dewey’s critique a step further by invoking critical examination, and reconstruction of, views of epistemology and its relationship to education. Critical theory, as applied by the Frankfurt school, aimed to change society as well as understand it. These theorists emphasised the role of epistemology within social oppression. They considered that epistemology was a hegemonic tool because it produced ways of knowing that resonated with dominant power interests (Seidman, 2004; Kincheloe, 2008; Le Ber & Branzei, 2010).
Freire (1970) added to this by arguing that education could be used to counter rather than reinforce inequality. Freire shared Dewey’s aversion to a model of teaching that involved transmission of knowledge which he likened to making ‘deposits in a bank’ (Freire, 1970, p.70). He refocused
attention on critically examining the role of education in society, and on what and whose knowledge counts. Freire emphasised the impossibility of neutral education systems but believed that education was a way forward that could allow ‘oppressed’ people to overcome their oppression. For such an outcome to be possible involves recognising and disrupting the automatic way that education acts to support hegemonies by directing knowledge, thinking and action (Freire, 1970).
17 For example the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) which is the authority that implements education policy in Victoria, Australia specifically acknowledges within their Principles of Learning and Teaching (PoLT) guidelines the significance of student experiences in structuring learning (DEECD, 2011)
18 The ‘Frankfurt School’ was not a school per se but was the informal name given to a group of social theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt during the 1920s and 1930s.
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Critical education that emphasises its socially situated nature and acts transformatively to counter inequity enhances the connectedness of individuals, schools and their communities and strengthens social capital in communities. Putnam & Feldstein (2003) argue that connecting people can allow them to reach goals beyond those possible for them as individuals. People also enjoy the intrinsic satisfaction of belonging to a community. These authors argue that there seems to be a current trend towards reduced social capital as a result of lifestyle. Technological, economic and social reasons are portrayed as acting to distance rather than bind people. However, they also argue that society as a whole benefits from the social ties forged when people choose connective strategies in pursuit of their goals (Putnam & Feldstein, 2003).
Global Connections, as its name indicates, was designed to connect people. It is intrinsically
dependent on the differences inherent to the different contexts of the young people in each country.
However, while recognising difference the program aims to collapse the sense of difference so that the young people can connect to and celebrate their shared ‘sameness’. In this instance the
connections create and strengthen a global sense of community. The program is grounded in values of social inclusion, participation and equity in the way it sets up the connections between groups of young people. In this way, the program does not act to reinforce or reproduce the existing
hegemonies that created the difference in the communities but instead acts transformatively to allow young people to generate their own new understanding and new knowledge about how they are connected to their world. As such the program closely aligns to a socially-critical purpose of education and is diametrically opposed to the economically driven economic purposes introduced in the previous section.